The New York Public Library Digitizes Menus, Delights Research-y Types

March 14, 2011

Here’s excellent news for academics, historians, and food obsessives alike: The New York Public Library is taking its collection of some 40,000 New York restaurant menus dating back to 1843 and digitizing the whole lot. The New York Post reports that, beginning this spring, the library will enlist a small army of volunteers to transcribe all of the dishes on the scanned pages in order to index the database. Chances are that once those volunteers have completed the task, they’ll be unable to bring themselves to order from any actual, still-existing menus for quite some time.

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